During the early years of his career Audie Murphy normally played aw-gee-it-isn't-his-fault kids, not very wordly, even though lethal with a gun. His performance here is totally different - he's cocky, enigmatic and confident gunslinger, comfortable with women and his ability as a killer, more along the lines of the ones Errol Flynn or John Wayne played. And he pulls it off, too - this was his tenth film and he was growing as an actor. There's a long scene with Murphy being bare chested - presumably Universal thought it was his turn to join their other beefcakes such as Jeff Chandler, Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson.
It's a clever script: the plot involves Murphy as a gunslinger who is hired to intimate a farmer... so the farmer deliberately loses to Murphy at poker so Murphy has to take over his ranch, and this fight the forces who Murphy was going to work for. The farmer's daughter (Susan Cabot) doesn't like him and is in love with her father's foreman, but he turns out to be a baddie. He has an old flame, a saloon singer (who sings 'See What the Boys in the Back Room While Have'), who wants him to kill a local tycoon she's going to marry so she can inherit it. Murphy's old gunslinging colleague Charles Drake turns up and we're not sure if he's bad or good.
The relationship between Murphy and the female characters feels undercooked - Murphy and Cabot fall in love too quickly and unconvincingly. And it loses points for Murphy being saved at the end by a demux ex machine. But there's lots of smart dialogue and this is a genuinely good Western.
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